A normal user's look into the world of 3D Stereo Technologies

If you wanted to be able to stream 3D video in Full HD resolution in your home wirelessly, then you’ve probably had a hard time figuring out how to do it. But now there is a dedicated solution capable of streaming 1080p 3D video along with multichannel 5.1 audio that should probably make your life easier, coming from IOGEAR, in the form of a product called Wireless 3D Digital Kit (GW3DHDKIT). The Wireless 3D Digital Kit consists of a transmitter and receiver, together with a remote control and it allow you to stream SD, HD or 3D content from standard HDMI enabled devices. The streaming device is compatible with Blu-ray and DVD players, DVR/set-top boxes, game consoles and computers supporting stereoscopic 3D output in HDMI 1.4 frame packaged format and it is also HDCP 2.0 compliant.

IOGEAR Wireless 3D Digital Kit should allow you to literally hide your video playback devices while still having them fully functional, a great help in creating a floating HDTV setup for example. And besides the wireless transmission of the video and audio to a HDTV set that is somewhere nearby, you also have the option to connect a second TV with an HDMI cable directly to the device and have both screens display the same content, but in different rooms. You can also have two different input devices connected to the transmitter and you are able to switch the input between them with the remote control. And you can also take advantage of controlling your playback devices via their remote control with no direct line of sight thanks to the IR pass-through function that will transmit the infrared commands from the receiver to the transmitter and to the playback device.

The Wireless 3D Digital Kit is relying on the 5GHz wireless spectrum due to the need of higher bandwidth for HD and especially 3D video and is intended for home usage, but due to the higher operating frequency the range is somewhat more limited, so you get up to about 30 meters (100 feet) usable range for the wireless video transmission to work properly (can vary depending on the type of obstacles in front to the signal). The expected latency of the transmitted signal is less than 1 millisecond, so the delay would be minimal. The initial availability of the Wireless 3D Digital Kit is somewhat limited, with a recommended price of the device of $379.95 USD, and with a wide availability on the US market expected by the end of the year. If you don’t live in the US, then you might have some trouble getting a hold of this device as the presence of IOGEAR in other countries is quite limited.

Do you know that with the help of HTML5 you can now watch the stereoscopic 3D videos available on YouTube with 3D Vision directly from your browser, but for that to work you would need not only to have a 3D Vision PC, but also to use the latest Mozilla FireFox 4 browser as well as to update to the latest beta GeForce Driver 275.27. It seems that currently only Firefox 4 is being supported, but other browsers will most likely soon follow and HTML5 opens the doors not only for 3D Vision, but for streaming in other 3D formats as well. The biggest problem is that currently the vast majority of users still use older browsers that still don’t have support for HTML5, but the 3D video streaming option is a good thing to make you do the update… at least for me. And with the new iframe embedding code for YouTube videos you are able to embed 3D videos on your website as well that can be viewed directly through the browser in 3D with 3D Vision if the visitor is using Firefox 4. When you open a 3D video from YouTube just click on the 3D control, select “other options…” and use the “HTML5 Stereo View (including NVIDIA 3D Vision)” to watch the YouTube 3D video in stereo 3D inside your browser. If you are having trouble and it is not working, make sure you are using the latest FireFox 4 browser as well as that you have installed the latest 275.27 beta drivers on your 3D Vision-ready system. Here is an HTML5 YouTube 3D test video to try with that should work just fine.

Aside from the YouTube 3D support for 3D Vision with HTML5, Nvidia has also made available a short 3D Streaming with HTML5 instructions as well as some simple Javascript code that you may immediately use to implement HTML5 3D Vision streaming on your website. This comes as an addition to the already made available 3D Streaming with Silverlight from last month, so now you may have more options to provide 3D video streaming off your website.

If you have missed to take a look at the online 3D streaming of the 2011 Masters Golf Tournament, you can do so now after it has finished by downloading a short about 6 minutes 3D sample capture from the stream. The original 3D stream was broadcasted in Over/Under format with 960×540 resolution (squashed) and 2 Megabits bitrate (for both the video and audio) and the captured sample you can download pretty much follows the same format, but is encoded with Xvid video and MP3 audio compression. You are welcome to leave your comments after watching the video.